1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and a method for improving the handling of notification items related to the execution of instances of process models and/or activities within a Workflow Management System (WFMS) or a computer system with comparable functionality.
2. Description of the Related Art
A new area of technology with increasing importance is the domain of Workflow Management Systems (WFMS). WFMS support the modeling and execution of business processes. Business processes executed within a WFMS environment control which piece of work of a network of pieces of work will be performed by whom and which resources are exploited for this work. The individual pieces of work might be distributed across a multitude of different computer systems connected by some type of network.
The product xe2x80x9cIBM MQSeries Workflowxe2x80x9d (previously called IBM FlowMark) represents such a typical modern, sophisticated, and powerful workflow management system. It supports the modeling of business processes as a network of activities. This network of activities, the process model, is constructed as a directed, acyclic, weighted, colored graph. The nodes of the graph represent the activities which are performed. The edges of the graph, the control connectors, describe the potential sequence of execution of the activities. Definition of the process graph is via IBM MQSeries Workflow""s Flow Definition Language (FDL) or via the built-in graphical editor. The runtime component of the workflow management system interprets the process graph and distributes the execution of activities to the right person at the right place, e.g. by assigning tasks in the form of work items to one or more worklists associated with the respective person, wherein the worklists and work items are stored as digital data within the workflow or process management system.
Workflow management systems are pro-active systems; that means they take actions if out-of-line situations occur. To support this behavior, they allow to associate with the construct of a business process, i.e. a process model, appropriate performance characteristics and the action to be taken in case the specified performance characteristics are not met. At build time, the process modeler can specify a maximum duration for the process and the individual activities in it. For example, a certain activity could be limited to one day and the entire process to four days. If one activity is not completed in the specified duration, a notification item is created and sent to a specified user""s work list (for instance informing the manager of the employee assigned to that task). If this user does not act on the notification in a period also specified in build time, then a second notification item is created and sent to a further specified user""s work list (for instance the process administrator""s work list). If a process itself becomes overdue, a process notification item is created and sent to the worklist of the process administrator.
The problem with this approach is that certain situations could cause a myriad of notifications to be sent out. If, for example, an employee can not handle the assigned workload, it may happen that notifications are sent for each of the assigned work items as the employee is always in catch up mode. Thus a potentially large number of notification items are created and sent to the appropriate user. This not only causes the appropriate worklist of the designated user to be swamped with notification items, but increases the load of the underlying network with adverse effects on the overall performance.
The present invention provides an approach that reduces the number of notification items to be created and sent to certain addressees, if an instance of a process model and/or an instance of an activity is not completed according to certain conditions, while still maintaining the full flexibility of the system.
The present invention relates to a technique for improving the handling of notification items related to the execution of process model instances and/or activity instances within a Workflow Management System or a computer system with comparable functionality (WFMS). The current invention provides a notification group definition associating a notification group with at least one process model and/or at least one activity. Furthermore, the process model and/or the activity are associated with a notification specification referring to an addressee, for whom the WFMS creates and sends to a notification item, if an instance of the associated process model and/or an instance of the associated activity is not completed according to certain conditions. The WFMS is responsive to the notification group definition by sending to the addressee a notification group item as representative for one or a multitude of created notification items of associated process models and/or associated activities, thus preventing individually created notification items from being sent to the addressee.
The approach of the present invention significantly reduces the number of notification items to be created and sent to certain addressees and thus improves clarity of the addressee""s work list; it will not be swamped with notification items which are the result of the same problem. Moreover, the communication load and risk of congestion within the computer network is reduced.